Link building is not dead. It is the farthest thing from death right now. Each and every year, it has been predicted that link building would become irrelevant but that does not seem to be happening. As a matter of fact, it is being used more and more in search engine optimization (SEO) across the globe. Google revealed that link building was part of its original search algorithm. Tests and reviews have proven that it still is an integral part of the search engines’ algorithms. Bing and Yahoo are the other search engines that are worth optimizing for and they take this into consideration too.
Let’s talk dead or broken link building now. Currently, this is the talk of the SEO streets. People think of it as a straightforward and narrow strategy that you will be done with in less than fifteen minutes. It is one of the most creative link building strategies to work with today. Sure, you can stick to the work of finding broken links on the blog rolls and link pages,then ask the webmaster to replace them with a link to you. However, with the broken link building, you can go well beyond this.
What exactly is broken link building?
Just for the purposes of clarity, it is worth pointing out what broken link building is all about. It is also known as dead link building. It is a process that involves finding an old resource that has now become a 404 error page and then rebuilding it. You then contact anybody who still has links to this page to inform them that they have a broken link on their site. After fixing the broken link, you will have a similar but updated version of the resource so that they can link to it instead.
This is a really cool way of getting the link that you want in an ocean of links. Remember that link building is not just one of those things that you do with your eyes closed. It is a very tricky affair and you have to make sure that you get it done correctly. Having low quality links is going to see your site’s search ranking being lowered. Google assumes that low quality sites link to fellow low quality sites. Birds of a feather flock together. So, you definitely do not want to be linking to a spam site or anything of the sort.
Dead link building is a tiresome process and it takes a good amount of time to complete. This is one of those SEO strategies that need the help of professionals to do it successfully. You do not want to be stressed up because you were rebuilding broken links or you decided against B2B services. B2B is the other strategy of business growth that you will always need professional help with.
The success of one individual
Ben Jackson is the founder of SEO discovery, a blog that provides free tutorials on SEO work. He is also one of the first people to describe dead link building properly. One of the first pages to rebuild that he ever worked with was a site that was called Dosh Dosh. The page had a large number of backlinks in the neighborhood of 700. Imagine if you could get in touch with owners of these 700 links to link to your site? The site was still online but then every single page presented a 404 error.
After running a Google search on ‘Dosh Dosh’, he found a post that has listed some 18 posts that must be read at Dosh Dosh. Long story short, he found a page that he used to improve the Dosh Dosh version by adding a few metrics. The seven hundred links were good but a majority of them were repeat links from sites that no longer existed, but a number of good links existed with PR.
He went ahead to email some 40 webmasters who had PR and those who might not have PR but had decent Alexa rankings. Sites with high Alexa rankings and 0 PR were ignored. The results is that seven webmasters emailed and linked back, 3 emailed but did not link, 1 did not email back but linked and 1 emailed back, linked, wrote a blog post about the link building and linked again.
Why this was not greatly successful
There are several reasons why this might not have been so successful:
- There was little organization in the emailing work
- Poor outreach plan
- Other page characteristics such as numerous outbound links
All in all, this proved that dead link building is a great way to earn high quality links from various webmasters across the web. The best thing that you can do for your business is to seek professional assistance to get this work done for you.
About the Guest contributor:
Derek Iwasiuk runs a national digital search engine optimization firm headquartered in Minneapolis. He also spends a lot of his free time educating the minds of thousands of young SEOs and top agencies on issues like dead link building and B2B services. You can also follow him on Twitter @Diwasiuk
